“Just perfect for a harmless old geezer like me.”
“You show ’em, Bill.”
“Paul, about the Melman hearings. You’re not mad? I just told them what I’d seen.”
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
Bill licked his lips.
“Thanks, Paul.”
“Is that why you came?”
“Well, it’s—”
But Chardy darted off again. Speight stood helpless and watched him handle another crisis. Was that all these kids did, fight? But that’s all grown-ups did, wasn’t it?
Presently Chardy returned. “They really keep you jumping,” he said.
“They sure do.”
“Well, Bill?”
So this would be it then. On the playground, full of kids, no time to sit down and work it out in a civilized fashion. Chardy was playing him, he could tell. It was a no-win situation, all the noise, all the distraction. He wouldn’t handle it well. A presentiment of failure crossed his mind.
We should have sent somebody younger, they would say, back at Langley. They would say it to his face. They could be so cold these days.
“This,” Bill said, lurching ahead. He drew from his pocket and offered Chardy — who accepted it reluctantly — his treasure, the thing that had them running in circles at Langley.
Chardy looked at it, rolling it in his palm.
“A seven-six-five-millimeter Czech auto pistol shell. Must be ten million of these things floating around the world.”
“Look at that scratch on the rim, where the ejector rod popped it out of the breach,” Bill said.
“It’s a Skorpion shell. I can recognize a Skorpion shell. There’re Skorps all over the world. African generals love the goddamned things.”
“Let me give you the rest of it.”
Chardy looked at him. Bill could never read Chardy. The dark eyes squinted; the mouth now lost in beard seemed to tighten.
“Go ahead.”
“That particular shell is from a cache of stuff some boys from a battalion of the One-seventy-third Airborne liberated on a search-and-destroy in July ’sixty-seven, a big Charlie ammo dump out near Qui Nhon. Mostly AK- forty-sevens, and those mean-ass RPG rocket launchers. Some mortars, some light artillery. The usual. But also a Skorpion. Very unusual for ’Nam in ’sixty-seven because the Czech stuff didn’t start showing up until much later. But there was a single mint Skorpion in this dump, still packed in grease, and thirty-five hundred rounds of seven-six- five.”
“And you’re telling me this is one of those thirty-five-hundred rounds?”
“Yep,” Bill Speight said almost proudly. “The arsenal marks check out exactly. See here on the base. It’s marked ‘VZ-sixty-one.’ That’s their manufacturing code for the Brno Arsenal and that lot of seven-six-five was made in January ’sixty-six. Same lot as we found in ’Nam. It can’t be coincidence. You know what happened to that ammo?”
Chardy said nothing.
“Well, sure you do, Paul,” Bill said. “We took that Skorpion and twenty-five hundred of those rounds into Kurdistan with us in ’seventy-three In the operation we called Saladin Two, the Kurdish show. My show, your show. Especially, at the end, your show. Along with the other stuff, the AKs, the RPGs. Enough to start a small war. And we did start a small war.”
Bill knew all about gear. His specialty was logistics, clandestine resupply, and he had organized the distribution of arms to guerrilla operations all over the globe, back when he was one of the cowboys of the Special Operations Division. He had been through some hairy moments himself.
Chardy nodded, as if in memory of the small war and its hairy moments.
“And you recall that you gave Skorpion to a certain man?”
“I gave it to Ulu Beg,” Chardy said. “Where’d you get it?”
Speight told him of the deaths of the two Border Patrol officers.
“That case was one of forty recovered on the site. He fired two magazines. Those officers were torn up pretty bad. You know what a Skorpion can do.”
The Skorpion was a Czech VZ-61, a machine pistol. Ten inches long with its wire stock folded, it weighed three and a half pounds and fired at 840 rounds per minute, cyclical. It was one of the world’s rare true machine pistols, smaller than a submachine gun and deadlier than an automatic pistol.
“Bill, it’s just one shell. You’re dreaming. You’re building crazy cases from nothing. A shell, an arsenal mark, a scratch in the brass.”
“And there’s this, Paul,” Bill said. He reached into his briefcase and after thumbing through the reports from Science and Technology, the airline tickets, the maps, he came up with a picture of a body in the desert.
Chardy looked at it.
“How was he facing?” Chardy asked.
“He was facing east. The report says the body was moved. They think the killer was searching for money or something. Yet the wallet was left untouched. They can’t figure it. But you could figure it, couldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Chardy said. “He didn’t mean to kill the guy. He didn’t want to. He felt bad about it. So in the frenzy of the moment, he tries to help his soul to paradise. He turns him on his right side, and faces him toward Mecca, as the Kurds bury their dead.”
“You saw enough of it, Paul.”
“I guess I did. A Kurd is here. Maybe Ulu Beg himself.”
“Yes, Paul. After all, we never got any confirmation of his death after Saladin Two went under. And if it’s any of them, it’s him. And you know how the Kurds feel about vengeance.”
A bell rang.
Bill looked to Chardy. The moment was here; shouldn’t Chardy be reacting? A man he’d trained and fought next to and lived with seven years ago in Kurdistan was here, with a gun, willing to kill.
The children began to collect in a riotous mass near a set of steel double doors. Nuns appeared. Small skirmishes broke out.
“Mr. Chardy—” a nun called from the doors.
“Paul, it’s—”
“I know what it is, Bill,” Chardy said. “Goddamn you, Bill, for bringing all this back.” He turned and went inside with the kids.
So Bill had to wait after all. He found a bar, a seedy, quiet little place in the next town up the road, and killed the afternoon with rum-and-Cokes at a table near a pinball machine in an empty room. He smoked half a pack of Vantages. He set the glasses before him in a neat formation. He had five of them at the end.
He’s got to come, he thought. He’ll think it over; he’ll see it’s just as much his job as anybody’s. Ulu Beg is a loose end of a Chardy operation, no matter that Chardy was kicked out, no matter that he’s been hiding out here, playing schoolteacher all these years. He has to come, Bill thought, wobbly.
It’s his legacy. He stood for something, all those years. He was one of the heroes, one of the cowboys, and the thing about the cowboys, they never said no. Nothing was too hairy for a cowboy. They were crazy, some people said, they were animals; and lots of the staff couldn’t stand them. But when you needed a cowboy, he was there, he went in. He lived for going in; it’s why he became a cowboy in the first place, wasn’t it?
Bill tried to convince himself. He looked at his Seiko and had trouble reading the hands. He’d had too much to drink; he knew it.
“You okay, mister?” The waitress, looking down at him.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“You better call it quits,” she said.
“Truer words,” he said, laughing grandly, “was never spoke.”
The traffic had gotten pretty thick and he didn’t reach Our Lady of the Resurrection until 5:15. He parked
